Archinect - News

UPenn Weitzman School extends dean Fritz Steiner's tenure to 2027

2024-11-11T08:00:00-05:00

The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has announced it will be extending the tenure of dean Frederick "Fritz" Steiner for two additional years through June 30th, 2027.

He joined the school early 2016 in part a protest of the controversial "campus carry" weapons policy that was enacted at the University of Texas at Austin. Since that time, Steiner has been credited with improving the school financial position and bolstered DEI efforts for both students and faculty.

Steiner, who also holds a prestigious Paley Professorship and teaches in the departments of city and regional planning and landscape architecture, said: “I couldn’t be prouder of the work that our faculty, students, and alumni are doing to build a better future. When you bring artists, designers, planners, and preservationists together, the possibilities are thrilling.”

University of Pennsylvania appoints Rossana Hu as Architecture Chair

2023-04-12T17:13:00-04:00

The University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design has announced its appointment of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office co-founder Rossana Hu as the next chair of its Department of Architecture.

Hu, who is currently on the faculty of the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, will take over chair duties effective January 1st of next year. Current associate professor and MArch program director Andrew Saunders will lead in an interim role beginning in the fall.

Hu will become the third woman to serve as the department’s chair and continues a relationship with China that has been long-established at the school since the beginning of the 1920s.

“We see ourselves as mediators: between past and present, individual and collective, public and private, rural and urban,” Hu said of her firm’s approach to design, before adding, “It’s clear that the faculty and students at Penn are equally committed to this vision.”

Related on Archinect: The Wei...

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson to chair the Landscape Architecture Department at the Weitzman School of Design

2023-03-28T15:04:00-04:00

The Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that Catherine Seavitt Nordenson will be taking over as the next chair of its Department of Landscape Architecture, effective July 1st.

The current Spitzer School of Architecture professor and director of CCNY's Master of Landscape Architecture program will replace Richard Weller and will be the third woman ever to lead the department following Anne Whiston Spirn and professor Sonja Dümpelmann, who had been serving as its interim chair since last spring.

A press announcement from the university called Seavitt “one of the most admired scholar-practitioners of her generation.” Her career began as an Associate at New York’s Atelier Raimund Abraham in 1993 and has made stops at Pei Cobb Freed and Partners in addition to the academic appointments at Parsons, the University of Virginia, and two of her alma maters Princeton and the Cooper Union.

Seavitt, both a registered architect and landscape architect, also ...

Historian Amber Wiley to lead UPenn's Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites

2022-09-19T09:00:00-04:00

Award-winning architectural and urban historian Amber Wiley has been announced by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design as the inaugural Matt and Erika Nord Director of the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS).

The current Rutgers University assistant professor will also hold the title of Presidential Associate Professor and lecture primarily in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. Wiley holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in addition to degrees in Architecture and Architectural History from Yale and the University of Virginia.

From Wiley's 2021 CPCRS talk titled “The Revolution Continues.” Image courtesy UPenn.

She comes to the new positions highly recommended as the author of the forthcoming title Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital and curator of Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum, now on view at Rutgers’ New Bru...

A ‘hospital of the future’: Foster + Partners opens new medical school building at UPenn

2021-11-19T09:00:00-05:00

With the spiritual and material well-being of its next-generation patients in mind, the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine has opened an inpatient facility from Foster + Partners and others that is being heralded as a “hospital of the future.”

Located on Penn’s historic West Philadelphia campus, The Pavillion is the university’s answer to the growing body of scholarship that supports a patient-oriented approach to care that is embodied in its design and functionality.

“The new Pavilion is designed to completely redefine the future of healthcare,” Norman Foster said. “The building enables innovations that reflect University of Pennsylvania’s history of medical firsts, creating a truly flexible facility that molds itself to the needs of the patient. Responsive, adaptable and future-proof, it will allow the hospital to continue its crucial life-saving work and remain at the cutting edge of patient care.”

The University indeed h...

MASS Design Group, Minneapolis to be honored by UPenn's Weitzman School

2021-11-18T17:04:00-05:00

MASS Design Group will be honored alongside the city of Minneapolis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in a public celebration held at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy this evening.

The Boston-based firm will receive the prestigious Kanter Tritsch Medal for its “design excellence and commitment to a climate-positive future.”

Likewise, Minneapolis is being honored with the Witte-Sakamoto Family Medal for its comprehensive 2040 resiliency plan that was developed with the help of Buro Happold.

“MASS and Minneapolis remind us of the central role for design in overcoming seemingly intractable challenges like unequal access to jobs and housing, and mass incarceration,” Weitzman dean Frederick Steiner said in a statement. “Our professions have a lot of work to do to see that entire communities aren’t left out of the design process.”

The non-profit, non-...

Center for Architecture and Design to honor KieranTimberlake with its 35th Louis I. Kahn Award

2021-10-07T13:52:00-04:00

Philadelphia’s Center for Architecture and Design will honor Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake with the 2021 Louis I. Khan Award.

The duo and founders of eponymous KieranTimberlake will join David Adjaye and Jeanne Gang as recent winners of the annual award now in its 35th year.

The award is meant to recognize the influence of its namesake, a Philadelphia native and icon of modernism, that Timberlake referred to as an “architect’s architect.”

“We are humbled and grateful for this award,” the architect said in a statement. “As for Steve and me, and the firm at-large, it is recognition of the diligence, effort, and hard work that we give to each and every commission and an acknowledgment to our clients that they made the right choice.”

Related on Archinect: How To Get A Job At: KieranTimberlake

KieranTimberlake’s practice was first established in the city in 1984 and has since gone on to establish itself as an international leader in the industry, with multiple AIA awards and a 2010...

How do architecture and literature relate?

2019-10-30T11:41:00-04:00

This is the second time the Architecture Department will offer "Topographical Stories: Architecture, Literature, and Cities," a seminar taught by Architecture professor David Leatherbarrow. Leatherbarrow said students in the class will examine texts from authors writing about specific cities, comparing them to pieces of architecture from the same city and the same time period.

The UPenn Benjamin Franklin Seminar will be offered this spring. According to Professor Leatherbarrow, "the goal for the course is to get students thinking about architecture in a new way by looking at the discipline using many approaches," reports The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Some of the pairings reported for the seminar include author Sherwood Anderson and Frank Lloyd Wright exploring the city of Chicago; Italian writer Dino Buzzati and Ernesto Rogers to examine Milan; and many others.

UPenn and The Architecture Lobby to livestream "Designing a Green New Deal" symposium

2019-09-12T07:00:00-04:00

This Friday, the University of Pennsylvania will hold Designing a Green New Deal, a day-long symposium aimed at articulating a design perspective for "a still-abstract set of proposals for decarbonizing the economy, eliminating poverty, creating green, working-class jobs, and retrofitting communities for the coming effects of climate change."

The day-long event features a series of panel discussions made up of some of the leading voices in the climate, sustainability, labor, and design communities, including Peggy Deamer of The Architecture Lobby, landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, and Billy Fleming, director of UPenn's Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism + Ecology.

A description for the event, which will be livestreamed below, says, "Domestically, a Green New Deal would constitute a generational investment in planning and design, reshaping the social and physical landscape of the U.S. in ways matched only by the Industrial Revolution, New Deal, and postwar suburban boom. But th...

Get Lectured: University of Pennsylvania, 2019-20

2019-08-28T15:15:00-04:00

Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Fall 2019

With a new school year upon us yet again, it's time for Archinect's latest edition of Get Lectured, an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back regularly to keep track of any upcoming lectures you don't want to miss.

Want to share your school's lecture series? Send us your school's lecture series poster and details to connect@archinect.com.

Featuring a poster designed by WeShouldDoItAll, The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design's Department of Architecture begins their Fall '19 lecture event series today with a conversation between Thom Mayne and Wolf D. Prix. Other events this semester include Mimi Hoang and Eric Bunge; Keller Easterling; Hernan Diaz Alonso; Gregg Pasquarelli; and the book launch of “Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures”.

For Spring 2020, lecturers include J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Höweler; Georgina Hulj...